March Madness - with robots - comes to the Long Beach Arena

LONG BEACH - March Madness has come to the Long Beach Arena. For the next two days, 66 teams will be hooping it up on the arena floor.

The twist is these hoopsters aren't human. They're robots built by local high school students and their professional engineer mentors and teachers.

The event is the FIRST Robotics Los Angeles Regional competition. And this year's basketball-like games have been dubbed the "Rebound Rumble."

Top teams will be eligible to advance to the World Championships in St. Louis in April.

"I say March Madness is right here," said Ric Roberts, regional chairman of the event and a systems engineer at Raytheon, which sponsors the event.

On Thursday, the 66 teams comprised of more than 1,300 students and more than 100 adult engineer mentors and advisors were busy getting their robots ready for the actual games that begin today and continue through Saturday.

Although Long Beach did not have any teams in the competition, California Academy of Math and Science of Carson represented the Long Beach Unified School District.

CAMS has several extracurricular robotics programs, but "this is the varsity," according to team coach and physics teacher Ted Harder.

As the CAMS team, dubbed the Nerd Herd, scrambled to get their robot ready, members were both nervous and excited.

Nathan Choe, 17, said he thought his team would fare well, "as long as we can get (the robot) moving."

Perhaps "nervous" was prevailing over excitement the day before the competition. As morning bled into afternoon Thursday, Harder said, "I've got to go yell at my team."

The physics teacher, who has coached the team since 2005, said he was fighting off the urge to get in and start working on the robot, nicknamed Macaroni.

Lauren Froschauer, a senior from Long Beach, is the build chair of the team, the equivalent of the team captain.

"We're in the dark of how we'll do," she said, although she was concerned that the team was hours behind schedule.

This year's robot, she said, was much more complex than last year's version and was made almost entirely from parts machined at CAMS, rather than parts from a kit.

Each year, new robots are built, and each year the sport or activity in the competition changes. Last year, robots had to stack inner tubes; two years ago the robots played a soccer-like game.

According to Victor Kee, an MIT-bound senior from the Palos Verdes peninsula, Macaroni has a shooting range of up to 25 feet. Spinning wheels inside the robot fire the ball toward the basket.

It also features a rotating turret, built-in camera and range finder.

CAMS has had success in the past, advancing to the World Championships in 2008, and last year advancing to the competition as a wait-listed team.

While the competition is the pinnacle for the kids in terms of fun, Harder says there's a larger goal.

"This is where kids take ownership of what we teach in class," he said. "And if you stick around, you get to do something awesome. It's the culmination of what we do in the classroom."

And while that other March Madness will be continuing through the weekend, the public is invited to a different brand of the game - and it's free.